To reconcile this, you code the charges to your sales account, whatever that is. It is different for every business, but usually starts with a 2. Like 201.

You then reconcile the fees to your bank fees account. We actually set up a “Stripe fees” account because we separate our fees to our bank, PayPal and Stripe.

The transfer is then reconciled by “matching” the transfer in your main bank account where Stripe deposits the money.

After all of this, the Stripe account balance would be zero.

You can get more advanced by setting up bank rules so that Xero recognises all of these transactions and shows the “OK” button in the middle of a green row. All you have to do is give it a quick glance and click OK on all transactions.

You can do this by creating rules on the data that Silver Siphon brings into Xero. Check out the “Field Mapping” section on the Services page to bring in data and even custom text that you can use in bank rules.

There is a function in Xero where it tries to detect duplicate transactions.

Duplicates are flagged if there is a transaction of the same amount, on the same day, that is uploaded to Xero on a different day.

For example, imagine you have two a $50 transactions on one day. One is delayed for some reason, and payment is received two days later, but the transaction date is the original date. That second one would appear in Xero two days later with the same date and amount.

Unfortunately, the algorithm doesn’t look at the payment description or payee. Only the date and the amount. That transaction will be deleted without a notification to you.

This is a question that comes up a lot. One of the best features of Stripe is that it allows you to seamlessly operate in multiple currencies and convert it all back to your main currency with zero input from you.

However that can cause an accounting nightmare in Xero, depending on how you want to do your books and how many currencies you work with.

That is because Xero only allows one currency per account.

Before you start syncing Stripe transactions to Xero, you need to really think about how you want things to look. Do you really need multiple currencies in Xero, or is converting it all into your home currency good enough?

Using Silver Siphon, you have two options. The example below uses Aussie Dollars (AUD) as the home currency, charging customers in USD. These are for example purposes only and they could be any currency in your setup.

Set up one account in Xero, in AUD. Stripe automatically converts everything to your home currency. This is the most popular method, the way we do things in our business, and usually the easiest. If you choose this method, on the Services page make sure “use original currency” is unchecked (the default)

Set up two (or more if you have more than two currencies) accounts in Xero, one in USD and one in AUD. The main reason you would use this method is if you need to reconcile against invoices in Xero and you want the amount to match exactly in the same currency. You can still match AUD to USD invoices, it’s just a little trickier and won’t match automatically.

The issue with this method is that the accounts balances in Xero will keep moving in one direction (AUD up, USD down) as there is no balancing between the two currencies – Stripe only transfers to your bank account in the one lump sump of AUD. If you go this way, you can link multiple Xero accounts on the services page. If you have already set up an account, you can unlink Xero and then relink, selecting multiple accounts.

Xero and Stripe are two amazing platforms, used by countless businesses around the world. It’s a bit unfortunately they don’t play very nice with each other.

If you’re already set up accepting payments via Stripe and creating invoices in Xero, you’ll have already noticed that reconciling the payments against invoices is far from simple.

As it stands, Stripe will transfer bulk sums of money into your bank account. By default, it looks like this

Stripe Transfers appearing in Xero

If you are processing multiple invoices per day, this sum is made up of all of those invoices, subtract Stripe fees.

Step 1

Click the Find & Match button, or the link at the top right of a bank statement line (money received)

Step 2

It will display a list of transactions that can be matched, including invoices. Tick all the invoices that fall under the corresponding bank transfer. As you do this, they will appear in the bottom box.

Step 3

When you have selected them all, the total will be out by the Stripe fee amount for the day. At this point, you should double check the fees in your Stripe dashboard to ensure everything matches with what you’ve just done in Xero.

Step 4

Then, click the adjustments button in the bottom right hand corner and select “Bank Fees”.

Enter in all the usual transaction fields as shown below. If you don’t have a “Stripe Fees” account set up, just use “Bank Fees”. For the amount in the right hand column, it needs to match the red text next to “Total is out by”.

Once the totals match, the Reconcile button will go green and allow you to reconcile all of the invoices you matched.

The Simpler Way

Silver Siphon enables you to import your Stripe transactions to Xero as if they were they own bank feed. This makes reconciliation against invoices incredibly easy, as Xero’s automatic matching comes into effect. You can also set up bank rules to reconcile against any other codes.

Recently Xero posted a comment on the feature request to be able to import bank statement lines via the API.

It went a little something like this:

Hello everyone, we know this has been a longstanding request, but a number of security and licensing issues have prevented us from providing this.

We have marked this as ‘planned’ as we still have it in our long term roadmap to provide it once we can add a more comprehensive permissioning model to the API, but the honest answer in terms of timing is that this will not be available in the next 6 months at least.

This is something loads of people want (and need) so there must really be something important getting in the way. This feature would make our lives way easier, and we have been waiting for it for quite a while. But for now, we’ll have continue with the workaround to import Stripe data into Xero.

There is at least some positive in it for us. The announcement means that Silver Siphon is still the only way to import Stripe as a bank feed in Xero, at least for the foreseeable future.